Adam Robinson: $1M ARR in 16 weeks with Founder-Led Marketing

all right we're live so back with another chat um today I'm joined by Adam Robinson CEO and founder of retention. comom which I I believe you bootstrapped around the 20 million AR Mark and most recently r B2B which helps companies identify Anonymous website visitors which you then push them to slack and and then they can engage them does that sound about right Adam that is correct my friend thank you for having me on no no the pleasure is mine so I wanted to kind of get straight to it because um you posted about a topic recently that is something I I find myself um thinking a lot about which is like the future of uh B2B SAS so there's there's a lot of change that's happened over the last few years in the SAS industry um and something you said recently was that B2B is sort of heading in this direction of B Toc um you know I know you have a background in e-commerce I'd like you to just share a bit more about that like what do you mean by that and what are some of the the trends you're seeing yeah so like I think that's an easy thing to say and I think you get a bunch of nods when you say it but like when you say that I think people are kind of like envisioning this world where in more style over substance like that's the changes that will evolve like the websites will look different and like the collateral you know the the the ebooks people download are going to be different or whatever um but like I think uh I mean so first of all I'm I'm not actually an e-commerce entrepreneur we have retention. comom sells to e-commerce stores and it's very specific it's like the top of the Shopify ecosystem which I mean these guys are incredible they have to like you know most of them are bootstrapped the complexity of creating a product in a brand that won't immediately get ripped off by people in China and get those products made in China and then get them very quickly delivered to people in the US and find those people on meta bring them to a website that will convert them at a very high rate and that whole part of your business work I I just think it's like I don't know maybe it's because I have a great CTO maybe it's because I just think it's harder than what I do you know like and I always thought that like I looked at what they were doing I was just like man it's like almost what I do but also all of this other in real life stuff you know in the physical world like actually moving physical atoms around so um you know I I think that one part of it where it's like build a brand good enough to where China doesn't immediately copy it with some you know five consonant you know brand and just start shipping it out for 90% less cost than you from the same Factory that you're using right like uh that's this really interesting aspect that I think leads to a bunch of other kind of like go to market behaviors from them um and I think like every one of those Shopify stores is based it's like a story you know the the brand is so important it's like the beliefs and the story that's being told it's like you know not a story like a story book but like you kind of know when you hit a site what they're all about you know they're very good like a picture's worth a thousand words right like they're very good at like like you kind of know if you hit the side of someone who cares about the planet that they care about the planet for example right um so there's that part of it that I think as everything else gets harder it will become so so like one thing that I said in that post is like the second anyone builds anything that works in SAS we're in a capitalist World there are 1,000 people who are like trying to build the exact same thing and then figure it out if they can how to Market it to even just their customer base for Less right like um so that's what China's doing with these factories so like what what is the the way around that right it's like it's it's it's brand it's trust it's like this this you know this very this thing you can't touch and feel that like pulls people into this world where they don't really care if someone hits them up over email and says they can get more for Less right it's like well that's not really why I'm here I'm here for like other reasons so um I think there's like like a lot of these shopy guys are really good at Community uh and whether they intended to do it or not it's just like the story that they're telling whether it's words or not is so compelling that there is this massive Community built around them and there's this like this like rampant fandom uh and uh you know if if you just assume that B2B will eventually be this like China Factory Paradigm I think the only two things that protect your brand are brand and Community it's it's it's the only two things you can't replicate in my opinion um you know if you can I don't know how you would right it's like uh a strong brand in a strong Community is like built on such incredible like people are are drawn to it because of its authenticity and uh that's just hard it's it's you can't I'm not sure that you can copy that you know like like truly sort of it's because it's a thriving organism too that like is is you know adapting over time or whatever so um so yeah that's like one of the biggest things and there's certainly Brands who have always done that and it just kind of looks different than uh than it did over there but like part part of why I think it's like inching more towards BC is like I don't know I read salesforce's earnings and it seems like prices are going lower it seems like we're you know it just seems like they're you know the the 10 years of just being like yep you know 25% higher in every you know on every contract or whatever it's seems like those days are numbered and then people people who have simpler Point solutions that can provide most of the value and plg or whatever they're not like causing the problem but like that will sort of contribute to this uh pricing pressure and um you know as you if you have a go to market motion like that then the thing that works in a world where people spend all of their free time on social media is a motion that looks a lot like the the BTC Motion in my opinion it's like I I I just have the this view that organic social media content is so much more valuable than um sorry good organic social media content like it's so much more valuable than a paid ad like it's just it it it's just night and day like if I think about my LinkedIn feed um you know and I see this ad served to me from timia Capital which is like Five Guys in yamakas a photo of them who I don't know and like I'm I don't want capital and like uh or like Rippling showing me the five businesses in Austin who are using Rippling versus like Sam Jacobs writing this post that like hits me in the heart about like how CEOs can fall into the Trap of modeling out their next year and then Staffing up around the model and why that never works and it's like oh like well that's what I didn't 2023 you know and like that was like my greatest source of pain for like eight months in a row trying to like undo that um just the amount of focus that goes to this excellent social media content amount of attention the amount of quality attention that goes there is like nine days so I kind of have this view that you know if you can create very good organic social media content you have the superpower if if you can harness it even if you can't create it you have a version of that superpower and I think Clay's doing an amazing job at it right now they have this Creator program I haven't seen so like apparently notion absolutely knocked it out of the park with this Creator program also uh and it was like Tik Tok based or something um you know that's like two out of a 100,000 SAS companies that have have have done this well whereas if you look at the BTC world all of them to some extent have you know figured out a motion to harness this ugc from people who like know how to create compelling organic social content um you know because it's just I mean it's just some it's like for all it's so much more authentic and like real like whatever else um so so yeah that that's you know I just think there's a lot of macro reasons why uh things will Trend towards motions that look more like they look over there um it's like if you know so it's like oh B2B is complex it's like well I think in many cases complexity is added in an attempt to lower turn and raise price and like at the end of the day you raise price you can plow it back into more sales and marketing right so it's like why are prices high in the first place you know like like is a better alter so like I just love picking on six cense it's like I think almost all of the value of that product is in the website visit and I think anybody that you speak to that uses it would kind of agree with that it's like the best intent signal is just this website visit like and then they make this templated lead scoring model that like may or may not you can't even really tell if it's working for two years years right uh and it takes three months to on board and like you know it's like isn't a free product just better than that that like that like tells you that like let's say that there was an incremental 10% value in this templated lead scoring model that takes three months to onboard or whatever right like what about something that you just set up in 5 seconds that like gives you 90% of the value of their product like like it you know so so yeah and look I also think we live in a world where uh there's increasingly more like uh silos of things growing at once kind of in opposite directions like what I'm saying can be true and the opposite of what I'm saying can be also true you know it it's like uh like MailChimp can be absolutely dominating at the exact same time Salesforce marketing clown can be Domin ating with like doing literally the opposite thing you know building a totally unusable product that like requires developers but like super complex organizations have to have that in order to like do what they need to do so so yeah I mean I'm I'm sort of biased by the the world that I'm in and like you know what I'm seeing but like we also have a freemium motion that is largely selling to to small businesses and like this that and the other so yeah that that's kind of that's the Genesis behind behind that post but what I would like like I'll bet you a million dollars in like 5 years more people have done what clay has done and like harness this ugc motion or this ugc uh uh whatever you want to call it this fire hose and like done a really good job at Community you know um in a d Toc fashion you know a question on this so I'm fully bought into that like I um I have friends that have Eon Brands and ugc agencies and so I've had like good insights into the impact of that um and something I've tried to incorporate with SAS companies as well like I've seen firsthand the impact of thought leader ads on LinkedIn this year you know I've spent tens of thousands of dollars the highest um highest performing campaigns by far um I mean it's like it's like not even close right like it's like but by the way can I so like I I just want to tell you why I think that is so just before before we move on not to cut you off so like one of my uh LinkedIn community members sent me this Gary vaner Che book dat trading attention Okay I wouldn't read the whole book but like the first 10 pages so like I've been feeling this thing just firsthand that I said about the amount of focus that deep thought leadership gets versus an ad right and in Gary ve this doesn't specifically apply to LinkedIn but it kind of lies to why the thought leadership ad is so effective so like he's like before Tik Tok all social networks were Distributing content based upon connections so the game was get as many followers as possible then put out stuff to get yourself more followers that was basically the loop right because the distribution was through the followers and the follower account was super [ __ ] important Tik Tok hit it was an intr space algorithm all of a sudden you could have zero followers and you could get in front of 15 million eyeballs and with some exceptions the best content was winning so at the same time there was like a saturation of people's time across social networks and they had to enter a war of attention with each other what wins a war of attention clearly interest based I mean it's just obvious that like all of the algorithms would shift towards interest based content and that's what reals and shorts and like all that stuff is about right it's like you know uh and then that really changes a few Dynamics the first is the people who can create truly great organic social media content on those platforms effectively have unlimited distribution power which is unbelievable because you don't have to be a big brand to do that unlimited distribution power used to be going to NBC and saying I have $10 million to run commercial and there was not really incentive alignment between the person creating the ad making good content for NBC's audience and NBC showing that ad because NBC just wanted the dough and they didn't really give a [ __ ] if like the car company sold cars are not right I mean it was a long term they did but uh now there's this perfect incentive alignment between the content creator and the platform they both want great content to be created right so it's this amazing leveler where you can show up with no other skill other than to create great content and you can outdo Proctor and Gamble and then you have this insane ability when you have something that hits to put ad spend behind only that which is like this incredible compounding effect so LinkedIn isn't quite there it's still very much a connection-based distribution platform but the thought leadership ad creates that compounding Loop so like for my competitors that can't create organic social media content that I can or like let's say everything they put out is one5 is effective I'm just gaining ground on them every day already ahead of them like I'm widening the Gap with every post that I make and then when I start doing thought leadership ads which like now that we figured out free to paid motion I'm like starting next week basically it's just gonna make that Gap you know what I mean like like there would be no way to comp it's like it is just this amazing thing right especially because the pricing is is such that it's so much less expensive to get that ad slot than with and I understand why right it's because people actually want to see the good content that your running ads spin behind rather than the Timmy a capital ad of just a photograph of people I don't even know you know um so it it is probably more people will figure figure it out but like I just think creating great content is not as easy as saying those words you know like like and like and like I you know in there's like not like you know in B Toc these people are full-time influencers like they are spending their lives getting better at the craft of creating content like I'm almost there but like I've seen the light and it's perfect for me you know and it's so not perfect for most CEOs like you're not you know a SAS re you know product and marketing guy selling a marketing and sales Tech to people who live on LinkedIn so like this is just this perfect [ __ ] thing but like um you know and I have a great team and I don't have investors and I can do whatever I want so like I've kind of handed off almost everything else and like this is what I do but like that's why I'm good at it dude like you know what I mean it's like it's like uh and I just don't and and there's this other part of it where like uh you know I kind of pick on this guy all time but it's sort of an example you have this pseudo competitor called warmley like Max is trying to like do some of the stuff that I'm doing but like I love Max but like wormley's at 1 million ARR and this is his first startup right like I sold one for 10 I bootstrap my next one to 23 million ARR in four years and like I just started another one and got to 1 million in 15 weeks it took him 16 months right like whose content are you going to listen to about working in public like like it's just not even a question so like as you become more successful it's the position that you're coming from that makes your content valuable you know it's like it's like my content working in public at 50 million is actually probably more valuable than my content working in public now my content working in public when I was stuck at 3 million for four years and hadn't done anything else who's going to [ __ ] read that nobody right like it's not that interesting you know um but so so yeah it's there's just a ton of stuff that makes it hard it's like all I'm trying to sort of defend is this like comment I got a couple weeks on weeks ago on a webinar where this guy Mark caslo who we have like kind of this LinkedIn Feud he he thinks I'm an idiot for saying in mlet out pound and like he is just like oh like now everyone's watching you and and they're going to be like Oh I'm just going to copy Adam it's going to stop working it's like I just don't know if many people are in the position to even do that it's not like you could wake up in the morning as a CEO it's not like you wake in the morning as anyone and all of a sudden be someone who's bootstrapped 22 million in four years and is is 15 weeks in to launching a startup that is at 1 million and you're telling people everything the combination of all of that is incredibly hard to replicate so it's almost like if people wake up and try to do what I'm doing meaning they copy my hooks they copy my templates they copy my takeaways it just adds to the noise and makes my stuff even better I think yeah I agree I agree it's you you can't just wake up one day and become like a a good copywriter like you have to actually have some Source you know some unique insights to to share with the market so you've because I I see content is one part of the picture right um like I think I I did a breakdown of Clay's success I'm in their create a program actually and it's it's been interesting to see um but I feel like um part of Clay's success has been the fact has has been a function of their product like the characteristics of their product for example the shareability for example if I'm an agency sharing content about clay actually increases my authority and attract more clients and so there's these like built-in mechanisms and so how are you thinking about things outside of content like pricing how the product has to be like bigger picture stuff because you know you might somebody might be great at getting attention but how what else do they what other levers do they need to pull to actually build like a business like a million dooll business yeah so like I I just think every situation is so different and every Market is so different um and uh like for example like this pricing that that we have which is free and then you know it's it's it's for so like it doesn't look like it but like our our product is free for 90% of people that sign up it's just most people don't have traffic so they they can't get 200 leads a month if you can't get 200 leads a month from us then you don't pay so like uh that was not always the plan the plan initially was because this product will end up being a high churn product category just because like whenever you sell leads as a SAS there's so many reasons to cancel that product that don't exist for a low- term product category like a CRM or something so like I was like well if you know normally you can't start selling into the midmarket because the midmarket requires you to have social proof and a brand and all this um but like I was like man like this audience building has become so strong that like we'll be able to start there so that was the initial plan and like now it looks literally nothing like that it's like we were trying we were going to like try 30 to 50K ACV like you know kind of you know some inbound on uh LinkedIn but like it would have been very high friction you know just it would have taken a long time to close the deals we would have been able to close a lot of them our Revenue would probably be much higher uh with like way fewer crost customers um and way less what do you call it like Goodwill in the market I think is a good way to describe it you know like just just enthusiasm about what we're doing right it would have been almost almost zero right because like we only would have had a few hundred customers nobody would know you know what I mean but like um but then the content was working so well that at one point it was like like and and I was also in the MailChimp space and I watch that and I've just I'm still so in awe of that execution you know the fact that like this company Constant Contact who pioneered the space went public at 100 million AR in 2009 MailChimp was at 2 million AR and without any funding they had this free product that no one took seriously literally for like five years it was like that's a joke it's a piece of [ __ ] you need customer support for email like anything you could say about it and then without taking a dollar you know you know what happened they sold for 12 billion to into it so I just think like why right like their so their product had viral Loops built into it which ours does not but like also there's this unbelievable uh in unquantifiable almost power it's like kind of a network effect if you have 60 or 70% of the market in users and everyone is using your product and most people are quite happy with it it it is something that you can't replicate any other way if like you know what I mean you like go to an event and like two out of three people are either using your free product or paying you like that's some it's like clavio enjoys this power in the Shopify space and like like I'm not kidding you if a a brand hits an AE at clavo it's an 80% close rate and their metrics are insane it's like and like there's people in that ecosystem who are smart entrepreneurs who are like you know tens of millions of Revenue that think that email marketing is not a competitive space because clavio is so dominant and they think that clavio is their only option but like email marketing is the most competitive space besides CRM it's the oldest space it's the most sea of sameness so like uh my my whole point is like the content was working so well that I was like man if we had a free offer it would benefit us because of this megaphone that we have a lot more than someone who didn't have the megaphone right because like I can accelerate the free the spread of the free so much faster with like all this awareness that I can generate right so that was the first idea and then the second idea was just like okay how do we just get everyone using this and in three or four years try to decide whether there's cohorts that are getting a lot more value than other cohorts you know so the idea was just take pricing off the table completely and the published pricing We have basically applies to anybody under like several hundred million of Revenue and it's like monthly basically under thousand bucks if you're bigger you're paying between 500,000 it's like literally like the questions they're asking have nothing to do with the price of it you know what I mean it's like oh is it gdpr this is it like you know what's your cookie like so like um so yeah I mean and now everything I'm trying to do is just make it go as fast as possible and build as much Affinity around Santos and I as characters as humanly possible you and then just like sell other products into it longer term basically okay yeah so I'm interested to hear about the long-term play but you said something interesting there so at what point um so let's say what you're doing right now let's call it founder Le marketing right you're the you're the sort of um the expert that everyone looks to and you know the main reason the company has grown at what stage does it make sense to try diversify away from that from the growth being so reliant on a founder or a co-founder or just you know the growth being reliant on the founder being seen on the internet you know at what stage if ever do you try to diversify away from that yeah it's a really good question so like I think I'd go back to a thing that I said earlier which is like there's a reason this is working so unbelievable well and it's because I am a SAS Revenue leader who has been objectively very successful relative to either the founders I'm selling to or writing content for or even marketers and sales leaders at a company that's Way Beyond any company that I've built they'd kind of rather be a bootstrapped SAS founder who's making millions of dollars every year right so like then this is kind of taking uh Russell Brunson um vocabulary but he's like the perfect position you can be in to do this the absolute perfect position is when you're like the future version of your prospects right because then you can teach and they'll listen and once they've listened they will literally do anything that you're doing and anything that you say so here's my question that I don't know the answer to um I mean it works unbelievably well in SAS but like this technology has application Beyond SAS uh how how what what does so it's like the answer to the question might be once we've sort of saturated this SAS Universe what I'm doing is not going to work in real estate like I don't give a [ __ ] about who I am I mean you know I talk all the time about how when I was trying to do what I'm doing now for Ecom and I wasn't trying quite as hard but I was putting a lot of time and energy into it it it just wasn't Landing in the same way because I'm not the future version like I'm the future version of some of them some of them want to have a sass but like the future version of them is the guy at hexclad who's got like a 375 million Topline 40 million bottom line you know bootstrapped founder-led business right like that's who they're listening to you know like I don't have any perspective on how to get into retail stores or like you know what like product mix should be or like whatever like the stuff that really matters to them I have no idea I know more than anyone about like email deliverability doesn't matter until it's a problem you know like how to expand card abandonment audiences it's like that's cool but once I've done it I don't care anymore you know so that was like that was like the struggle there so um it may sort of naturally happen that we have you know it just all depends on how you want to run run your business right like uh you know I think that like I just love efficiency it's just so amazing and like I think that like I'm not there yet but like if I were making what what were like insane amounts of cash uh just sort of this thing spitting it out I like don't know if I would need to like continue to like grow exponentially at much less efficient you know uh in much less efficient ways so like on one hand if you know if I can like stack all these businesses on top of each other and get it like somewhere between 50 and 100 million ARR and it is like super profitable um I may not even be faced with this problem of like oh we have to grow so how do I go sell this to real estate people which will inevitably be be much more expensive because I'm all of a sudden in a competition with everyone else trying to sell them stuff right whereas like right now I mean I'm not really competing with anyone because I feel like people are finding out about us through just following my journey in learning so it's like what's the competition for that I mean it's kind of like people selling Ed you you know selling info products at the end of these funnels so like the the the the content loses Integrity value or something like that so um really long-winded answer to I don't know but there's some precedent with clickfunnels I think like in Russell Brunson like he's not CEO of that company anymore like he hasn't been for several years uh he still makes content I'm sure that the content that he makes still funnels people in to clickfunnels even though it has nothing to do with clickfunnels but it's just like his face is so Anonymous with that company that um you know there's a link so yeah and then I think eventually it's like there's this other thing with like a free a freemi offer right it's like it's it's me spreading it right now in SOS or whatever but like you know if if if we have like two or three million users then the relative importance of my content to spread that versus just how powerful you know Word of Mouth gets when it's that many people using it if like one out of however many like talk to one out of however many I don't know um yeah that was a ramble I really don't I don't have a great answer to that but I think I think it's I think it's a different game than if like the founder is selling and closing deals you know for a lot of reasons like a Founder selling and closing deals is not scalable I truly believe this content thing is you know it's like yeah uh I'm not I'm might you know I'm I'm set up really inefficiently now because like I tried to like make a bunch of very high quality video and it just hadn't been working uh so I like hired these two people that are effectively like a film studio in-house but like Chris Walker does what I'm doing for like a fraction of the price I mean you know whatever and I'm probably getting good enough to where I could do it that way but like I'm just more ambitious than he is in terms of the content that I'm putting out um but like I'm not going to be spending more on this when the pipeline we're generating is forx whereas that doesn't really work for founder-led sales it's like you can kind of only do as many demos as you can do and still keep your company moving you know um yeah okay so yeah but but like like for just to elaborate on a little more it's like for me to add a YouTube channel onto this which like I'm kind of trying to it's not like like that should you know widen the tip top of the funnel a lot if done properly and not proportionally to the incremental hours that I'm spending creating content if that makes sense you know yeah it does yeah yeah so I know it's it's it's hard to speak in in um in like a general sense but so also you know your situation is very unique um you have like an insane story and like you said that I think um Russell calls it like the future-based cause or something um and you're really leaning into that so do you think in general let's say um you're building a SAS company you're breaking into like the mtech sales Tech uh category which is probably you know one of the most competitive ones do you think if if you can afford to do so do you think going down that sort of free free route or just like basically undercutting existing Solutions maybe do 80% of what they do but just do it for far cheaper do you think that is sort of one of the the go-to strategies or do you just think that this is just really unique for your circumstance so somebody asked me this question on another podcast they were like they were like you know what would you do if you were an AE of like complex product XYZ and you were trying to prospect and you were like giving no guidance right and it just got me thinking right like at retention. comom there's this vendor called Black Crow and I think they did an unbelievable job telling the whole Shopify Market that we work together and they just like got their script on everyone's site and they were like yeah we what we'll give incremental and charge you a third of whatever the incremental is right why do I love that it's like it's because it's super low friction you know like when you're starting out so much is working against you I mean just and like it's it's when you're your second time way less is working against you than your first time like your first time everything is working against you if you've like sold a business and you're on your second time like at least you can probably get like good people working for you you have like you'll be able to raise money or spend your own like whatever like there's so it's so much easier and then like you know now this for me is like I have Tailwinds that are unbelievable just because of all of the stuff that's going on around me which is totally a result of all you know everything I've done so every situation is not different sorry every situation is very different uh a lot of like like if you ask this question to an Enterprise seller who's worked at a company that's been around for 20 years they're going to give a very different answer than I'm going to give I'm like a zero to 10 startup guy that's like really my wheelhouse you know and like I for me it's like what does 0 to 10 mean it's like you need as many people using this thing and providing you feedback as humanly possible before you build it you need as many people talking to you about what you should be building as humanly possible because software is [ __ ] expensive to build and it's so easy to guess the wrong thing and like you just don't know how people are going to use it like you're not them even if you think you kind of are like like and there's there's just it's a great example of like a subtlety that like changed everything for us right so like uh you know we were making this great content and it was building so much Authority in this like really valuable you know pool of marketers basically so series being and Beyond marketers we were getting we had 300 calls between when we decided to build this in August and when we launched it in March and what the product the beta product we were putting people on was a pixel on their site and it sent them a spreadsheet and like there was there was like I would say like muted enthusiasm for it it was like yeah this is pretty dope I got to think about how to use it but like yes keep sending me the files I'm down it's like well that's $500 a month they're like eh you know uh so the moment that we pushed a LinkedIn profile to slack with a head shot and business email and I literally just showed my phone to people and was like these people are on the retention. comom website right now it was like how do I get that is that for sale already what is that I've never seen anything like that you could just see you know what I mean you could just see it so it's like that's a very small change like to an engineer that's hardly a change at all right like it it's doing one slightly different thing instead of routing it to a CSV you're routing it through an integration into slack but it literally completely changed the perception of this product right so um you asked a question about like look under I I don't know how like like I would give it away away for free I mean I did right like I I would like give it away for free it's like the first question is like if a product is free do people continue using it and then the next question is like okay what can you charge these people right so like you know the answer for number one for us was UN it was emphatically yes it's like for sure and then since we were giving the slack integration away for free because my you know genius idea originally was like in order to make this a low turn product I'm going to give the leads away for free and then charge like 2% of people $495 a month for a sophisticated HubSpot integration and Salesforce integration turns out you can parse the slack block with zapier so you can do whatever you want with the [ __ ] leads and then Salesforce owns slack I think right isn't that right yeah yeah if if you have Salesforce if you have slack integrated with Salesforce there's literally a button without us doing anything that says push this to Salesforce so that just didn't work at all um and then I made a bunch of posts you know eventually we just went to this thing where we're kind of charging for leads and it's going to be high chm but it just is what it is uh and even it so like there was even a great example of like like for me it's like in the beginning cheaper better right like because if it's not cheaper then all of a sudden sudden you have to contemplate whether it's worth it or not right but like if it is better and it is cheaper or if it is better and it is free like there's an irrational attraction to free it's like you know if we charged $1 instead of it being free we would have 95% less signups so [ __ ] weird right like just yeah yeah give you know what I mean it's like putting your credit card information in is not 90 it's just a weird thing right so like um yeah that that's just again like you have so much going against you when you're starting out it's like figure that premium pricing [ __ ] out later like you really haven't earned the right for premium pricing until you've dominated a market That's What premium pricing means like you are dominant so you can extract uneconomic rents from the market like Salesforce charges us more than pip drive it's because like if I want to hire good salespeople they know they know how to use Salesforce already so it's like that's just like a tax for Salesforce that Salesforce charges the ecosystem for winning the market right uh my argument is that if you're just launching a product like that's you haven't earned that right yet so you just need you need to eliminate friction like you're trying to get market share and get intelligence about what would make your product better and like none of that like like it just doesn't feel like the spirit of undercutting you know what I mean like that's ultimately what you're doing but like it's not because you want to just be cheaper than somebody it's like so that you can move it's so that you can increase the velocity of your entire business by just removing objections as many as possible Right like data and just move fast learn faster yeah yeah yeah yeah and like dude there's there's like your business has to work and like it works better when you raise prices for sure but like I think people so it's like super like if I hired a pricing consultant right now I will tell you what they would do they would raise my [ __ ] prices like do you know what they would be doing they would be butchering the brand that I have built over the last pseudo brand right like that's what happens when you raise price and it's so easy so like what do growth Equity firms do they buy profitable founder-led businesses that have great Brands they raise prices and then they sell the business three years later and in raising those prices they butcher the brand that the founder made over the last 10 years and it works for everybody because like the founder gets Rich the private Equity Firm wins and this imaginary but very real brand that was created in the Goodwill that was created with this ecosystem gets it it it is paying the price right so and and like that's happening in the MailChimp right now they were free for 2,000 people you know every single feature included uh for you know 15 years or whatever they had unbelievable Goodwill and into it is a public company they have to make more money like what they did when they bought that for 12 billion is they knew that when they Shrunk the free plan to 500 and took all the features away it was going to make them a ton more money right like uh and they're cashing in on it and they put sales people in place whatever so um I think that's really important to keep in mind it's like I you know we got in an argument about our pricing because like our we have this Enterprise sales guy that we hired for our data sales business who was like who priced this product originally for like above a thousand contacts a month and I could just tell by the questions that I was getting on LinkedIn DMs that it was wrong you know it's like if these people are asking these questions they're consideration cycle so like we were basically showing somebody you know sewing several people $2,500 a month 2,000 1500 3,000 those prices these days it kind of doesn't matter what it is it adds friction to buying whereas like the same people $7.99 on a credit card monthly no problem right no [ __ ] problem um so so yeah I you know we we we went with his prices on day one literally 24 hours later I'm like no like like we we're going to make this like under a thousand bucks from everybody like I'm just not these prices that you put out are not in the spirit of this go to market motion it's like premium you know and he's like well I sell premium pric products it's like it you know it increases the perception of you in the market it's like dude like we haven't earned that yet you worked at Zoom info right like like Zoom info earned that you know um so so yeah that's my view and all that no really helpful cool well we're at time I want to respect your time so it's been a really insightful chat good to chat with you Adam cheers